A number of agencies of the Federal Government support both basic and applied research that aims at discovering, understanding, and applying structural information about proteins and other biological macromolecules at the atomic level. In the early 1970's, crystallographers and other researchers recognized the importance of having a central repository of such information. This recognized the importance of having a central repository of such information. This recognition lead to the creation of a repository called the Protein Data Bank that is presently housed at Rutgers University. The Protein Data Bank serves as the primary international repository for experimentally determined macromolecular structural data including proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, peptides and viruses.